Beer in the States

I’ve just returned from a fantastic trip to the north eastern United States: Boston, New York and Vermont. I was pleasantly surprised at how good the craft beer scene is in the States – it seems to be growing at an increasing rate over there. In some respects that makes me jealous: there is a massive range of beer styles available and you can get interesting beer pretty much anywhere in the north east. But in other respects it doesn’t: if I lived there I would really miss cask conditioned ale drawn through a proper beer engine. That concept doesn’t exist over there. All beer is kegged or bottled, highly carbonated and served cold. Whilst I like that too, I’d miss English real ale.

Anyway, I have a few specific thoughts and discoveries from my trip to share on this blog. Rather than writing one huge article, I’m going to split it over a bunch of posts, starting with:

Craft beer availability

There are loads of craft breweries across the States. We stayed in Stowe in Vermont, and there are SEVEN craft breweries within ten miles of Stowe! (There’s even one at the von Trapp Family Lodge, for you Sound of Music fans.)

But it’s not so much that there are an expanding number of craft breweries that amazed me. After all, there are 33 craft breweries here in Cheshire (not including Cheshire Peaks of course! :-). What amazed me (and made me jealous) was the availability of these beers in supermarkets and restaurants.

Here in the UK, the big supermarkets will sell plenty of bottled beer, but it is usually all beer from the larger breweries. There might occasionally be a few beers from smaller local breweries in better supermarkets like Waitrose. I went into a Wegmans supermarket near Boston, and they had three huge aisles of American craft beer. There were other aisles for imported beer and for “domestic” beer such as Bud and Coors. But there were THREE aisles of just craft beer. I was astounded and somewhat jealous.

Three long aisles too. Count them:

Now let’s look at restaurants. Here in the UK the best you can hope for is the most generic of kegged bitter or lager. Indian restaurants will sell draught kegged Cobra or Kingfisher. Italian restaurants will sell bottled Italian beer (Peroni etc.). There is never EVER any British craft ale available in a restaurant. That lives in pubs.

Over in the States, every restaurant seemed to have at least one or two craft beers on draught. Really, I can’t remember going to a single restaurant where they couldn’t offer at least Sam Adams on draught. More often it was five or six beers, even in a simple Vermont pizza house.

Now to be fair, British cask conditioned ales require considerable more skill to manage than kegged beers. And the shelf life (sorry, cellar life) is considerably less. I don’t think it is reasonable to expect British restaurants to start serving cask conditioned ales. And most of our kegged ales are pretty generic. But as a restaurant goer there’s certainly a great deal more choice of beers with your meal in the US than here in the UK. Which is a shame because I think beer goes really well with food, and there are so many beer styles to choose from you can choose a beer to fit whatever you are eating.

That’s it for this post. I’ve got more to share about brewery tours and bars, but that must wait for another post.

Back to brewing

We're pleased to be brewing again after quite a few weeks break. Summer is not an ideal time for making beer because it's a little warm for an ideal fermentation, so it's good that we have had a break during the unusually fine English summer. (Although today is still rather hot!)

Today we are making an American Pale Ale, which will probably be the last light and summery beer we make before we descend into autumn. American pales should be crisp and light and pretty easy drinking - we're not talking an IPA here, so bitterness is usually around 40 IBUs.

We have a lot of left-over hops in the freezer which I would really like to get used up. They only last a certain amount of time, even in the freezer, and we've had these well over a year. So the beer will be bittered with Nelson Sauvin and Centennial hops and the flavour and aroma will be from the more restrained Cascade and Liberty hops. Andy is being very tolerant because I love these sort of beers but American hops are not really his cup of tea. I have promised him we'll move to a darker autumn ale next! Perhaps something like a Scottish Red Ale Andy?

Cheshire Peaks Bottle Labels and Pump Clips

A tad self-indulgent, maybe, but I thought it would be fun to bring together all the bottles labels and pump clips we have created for our brews. These are by no means ALL the brews we have done, merely those that we have bottled or found time to create a pump clip for. In terms of total number of brews, we have done 54 now since we started in May 2010.

May 2011	May 2011
June 2011	June 2011
July 2011	October 2011
November 2011	December 2011
May 2012	July 2012
August 2012	January 2013
February 2013	April 2013
May 2013

Blackberry Blonde

You’ve heard me say it before on this blog: the best laid plans and all that…

We’d got it all worked out – our latest highly experimental brew was to be a Lilac Blonde ale – genuinely, as the name suggests, a blonde ale flavoured with lilac petals. You can make lilac wine; you can make elderflower blonde ale, so why not lilac blonde ale?

So what went wrong? Well it was just timing really. The lilac flowers are only at their best for a week or two, and a weekend away, a load of hot weather so they never really got to full scent and my wife coming off her bike and breaking her pelvis meant that we were just never in the right place at the right time. So that brew has gone in the diary for next year.

So we needed a fall-back plan because we were determined to do some sort of flavoured blonde ale. Hence the Blackberry Blonde, which we made this Monday. It’s a fairly standard continental blonde ale recipe (think Leffe) – lager malt, carapils, munich malt and a little wheat. We fermented it for two days, then added 1.5kg of pulped blackberries to the fermenter. Actually, to be honest, we used mixed bags of frozen dark fruit which we carefully separated on a tray. So in fact it was blackberries, cherries, raspberries, blackcurrants and a few strawberries. But we’re calling it Blackberry Blonde. Maybe Black Berry Blonde is a little more accurate.

As you can see in the photos below, it looks like an alarming amount of fruit in 5 gallons of beer. It fermented like crazy until today, and now it’s slowed right down. I expect it will take another week to finish off, then we’ve got an interesting problem of how to get all the fruit pulp strained from the beer when we put it into the keg…

Spent Grain Bread

We’ve just finished making the Rushton Imperial Stout, and are sitting down feeling good about a creative day. It was a massive brew, and we ended up using both the borrowed mash tun and our own mash tun.

9.2 kg of grain!

Running off from TWO mash tuns

When we’d finished mashing I started scooping out the masses of spent grain, which tasted rather sweet compared to our usual brews. This is because the beer is very strong so we didn’t want to let it down too much by sparging a lot (washing the grains with hot water), so we ended up with some of the sugar left behind in the grain.

Bread! Surely some of the spent grain would make an interesting loaf of bread? I pulled out the breadmaker and dumped in a large scoop of grain – probably about 200g (so a drop in the ocean). I also added about 350g of white bread flour and the usual yeast, salt and fat. No sugar – I reckoned the grains were sweet enough anyway.

The result is highly dark (despite only white bread flour), very doughy and (eaten still hot with butter) utterly delicious!

Rushton Imperial Stout

I know we try to avoid puns as much as possible in our beer names, but I couldn’t resist this one! (OK, so actually there have been a few puns: Bohemian Wrenbury, Wheat Nancy, Knutsford Brown Ale, Audlem Unusual. So this one joins a long tradition of puns at Cheshire Peaks).

Anyway, for those that don’t know, Russian Imperial Stout is a beer style that takes stout to extremes – as big, rich and bold as a stout can be. They are usually about 9% ABV and highly bitter, then bottled and matured for at least a year. You may have had Courage Russian Imperial Stout – this is the classic. It’s something of an acquired taste, being so dark and roasty. I remember it being rather like drinking burnt toast.

So why now? Well we’ve just made a couple of lighter beers: An “English Pale Ale” (based on Marston’s EPA) and a southern brown ale (very malty and low bitterness, a bit like Mann’s Original Brown Ale). This has left us with a huge yeast cake, which will be ideal for fermenting such a big beer as a Russian Imperial Stout.

There’s a slight problem however. The malt bill is huge! To achieve 8.5% it requires about 9.2kg of malt. (82.7% Maris Otter, 6.5% Roast Barley, 4.3% Special B, 2.2% CaraMunich, 2.2% Chocolate, 2.2% Pale Chocolate). Way back, we made our own mash tun out of a freezer box, and we’ve found that this can hold no more than 5.5kg of grain. So we’ve borrowed our friend Andy’s larger mash tun (also a freezer box, but a commercial one from Brupaks) – this, he says, will hold up to 10kg of grain.

Talking of grain, we have neighbours that keep a few chickens down the road. We’ve tried them out with a bit of the spent grains recently, and they seem to love it. So they won’t be going hungry after Monday’s brew day.

Giving away beer

I have recently discovered a true joy in life: giving away something that I have made to friends. I don’t make beer to save money, nor because I particularly need lots of beer to drink; I make beer because I enjoy the process and the satisfaction of creating something. So to be able to share it with friends just adds to the enjoyment of the whole process.

I’ve recently given away bottles of the Audlem Smoky and Coole Pilate to John, Harry, Simon, Steve, Bruce and Ernie.

I had some lovely feedback from John (and I know he reads this blog), so I thought I’d share some of it with you.

“Wow. Loved them both. Neither would appear in my list of "normal tipple of choice" but that said, I really did enjoy them. The lager was very well gassed and sparkled quite merrily on pouring. The fizz didn't last much past halfway - I don't know how the commercial breweries manage to keep a drink sparkling to the bottom of the glass but there must be a trick to it - but the flavour was delightfully fresh and distinctively lagerish, although to my palate it also had echoes of a pale ale.

“The Audlem Smokey was a revelation… I wouldn't want more than one glass on any one occasion, but as a sipping beer on a Friday night (when I drank them both) it was near perfect.”

Cheers John! Glad you enjoyed them!